Summary
Get Millie Black tips its hand in Episode 3, revealing the true villain in another smart, pacey installment.
It might be a bit of a cliché that the white guy has turned out to be the villain in Get Millie Black, but this really does feel like the show for it. Episode 3, “Holborn” – in case you haven’t noticed, each episode is from the perspective of the titular character – devotes so much time to showing what a seemingly nice, reasonable, and progressive person Joe Dempsie’s Luke Holborn is that it was virtually inevitable he was up to no good.
The clue’s in the dialogue, I think. Holborn grew up with nothing, was driven by the hunger you have for everything when you’re born into those circumstances and acknowledges openly that the problem for people with everything is that they never feel like they have enough. It’s bad guy talk, just framed in the manner of a good guy trying to relate to his new partner.
There’s a lot of that here. Holborn has a Black wife and a mixed daughter, which I don’t think is an accident. We’re supposed to believe he’s different, unafraid of white hegemony. And he might be. There’s another scene later when he eats jerk chicken without flinching, which Millie openly remarks upon. As she begins to soften on him and begins to believe that he isn’t the fish-out-of-water outsider colonizer she initially suspected, we’re supposed to think that too.
Again, we might be right. But he’s still a bad guy. And whatever his open-minded tendencies might be, he’s still intimately tied to a human trafficking operation that Barracat later describes as an evolution of slavery. Despite his claims that Scotland Yard has sent him to acquire Freddie’s evidence on his family’s money laundering for the Sanguis Meridian crime syndicate, he’s really in Jamaica to cover his own tracks.
Holborn’s at least right when he says that his search for Freddie and Millie’s search for Romeo are one and the same. After discovering the photos of Romeo on Leddick Somerville’s phone, it’s clear to Millie that the entire family is involved, so she reluctantly agrees to partner with Holborn while Curtis remains laid up with the gunshot wound he acquired in the premiere.
There’s a ticking-clock device in Get Millie Black Episode 3. Freddie and Janet are due to leave Jamaica on a boat to Cuba, arranged by Hit Girl in exchange for the deed to the Hot Pinky. Millie and Holborn have to track them down before they disappear, which is easier said than done. The first lead takes them to the office of the Somerville lawyer, Heywood, which they find ablaze. Millie, true to form, rushes inside, but she collapses before she’s able to grab the hard drive from his desk.
Tamara Lawrance and Chyna McQueen in Get Millie Black | Image via WarnerMedia
We’re supposed to pay attention to the fact that Holborn saved Millie from this predicament when she presumably collapsed from smoke inhalation; one of the firemen even mentions she’s only alive because of him. But in hindsight, it seems suspicious that he dragged her out before she was able to acquire any evidence.
He underestimates Millie’s pull, though. She’s able to get Curtis to ask Daniel to retrieve the hard drive from the salvage, which he reluctantly agrees to. But Daniel is at the end of his rope in “Holborn”. He can’t stand Millie, he’s sick of living a secretive life, and would very much like for him and Curtis to abscond to Canada where they can live in the open as themselves. Curtis is skeptical. He’s so used to being oppressed that he sees simply not being as performatively waving a “rainbow flag”. And his loyalty to Millie is deep-rooted, as we’ll see.
Millie’s regular violations of police protocol don’t go down well with Barracat, especially not in front of Holborn. I like Barracat; she swerves the usual difficult boss archetype by walking the fine line between being supportive of Millie and cognizant of reality. She believes Millie can find Romeo, but she also believes that her efforts to do so might end both of their careers if she isn’t careful.
Luckily Heywood’s hard drive contains records of flights and shell companies that allow Millie and Holborn to get passport printouts for everyone who has been sent from Jamaica to London by the Somervilles. They were all sex workers or other marginalized people whose disappearances wouldn’t raise red flags. They traveled on their own passports and seemed to have exclusively met grisly fates in Blighty; one of the girls was found dead in London, another is in prison awaiting deportation, and a man was found beaten to death. His father reported him missing so many times that he eventually had a stroke from the stress.
It’s obvious that the Somervilles aren’t just laundering money – they’re trafficking people. Romeo is among them, but nobody asks the obvious question of what’s so special about him. He’s the only child in the bunch and the only one who was given a fake identity to travel with. He’s now in London, so I imagine Get Millie Black will be heading there soon. But there’s something we need to deal with in the meantime – Janet and Freddie.
Shernet Swearine and PJ Thwaites in Get Millie Black | Image via WarnerMedia
Millie is with Curtis, letting him know about the human trafficking, when Hit Girl calls her to tip her off about Freddie and Janet being at the harbor, about to depart for Cuba. She rushes down there, and Holborn convinces her not to call for backup. He frames it as a way to ensure the police don’t scare the two of them off by going in all guns blazing. It seems like he’s getting on-side with Millie’s unconventional way of doing things. Hindsight is 20/20, though. He’s setting her up.
Unknowingly, Curtis plays right into Holborn’s hands. He’s impatiently trying to follow the case from home, over the police radio, but when no information is forthcoming he calls to check up on the progress and realizes Millie hasn’t called it in. He wants to provide back-up himself, but Daniel won’t let him. If he leaves, he won’t be allowed back. So, he does the next best thing and calls Stennet, who arrives at the harbor with an assault rifle in record time.
While Millie tries to talk Freddie and Janet down, Stennet takes aim from across the harbor. And Holborn immediately gets in his ear, pushing him to take the shot. He makes it seem like he’s protecting Millie. When that doesn’t work, he threatens Stennet openly. At the same time, Freddie drops the bombshell to Millie that it’s Holborn he’s running from. Ever since he met him, his life has been turned upside-down. It was Holborn who summoned him back to the Somerville house right before the entire family was massacred.
Holborn finally convinces Stennet to take the shot, and he does. Because everyone – Freddie, Janet, and Millie – all drop to the ground at the same time, it isn’t clear who got hit, and Get Millie Black Episode 3 doesn’t reveal that. Instead, it climaxes by returning to the aforementioned Somerville massacre, but this time from Holborn’s perspective. He choked the family patriarch to death with his bare hands when he discovered him alive, right before Millie found him in the bedroom.
The question now is whether Millie got enough information from Freddie to have realized that the greatest threat to her – and to Romeo – has been right by her side all along.
RELATED:
